Liz Scarff who is a blogger in her own right but also works for Save the Children is taking a handful of bloggers out to Mozambique to follow the journey of a life-saving vaccine (on Twitter @Mr Vaccine) from the coldstore in the capital Maputo right down to a rural, hard to reach rural clinic where it will be given to a child by one of Save the Children’s roving health work. This is in order to highlight the plight of families there and to promote the importance of vaccination ahead of a global Vaccination Conference on June 13th.
What a brilliant thing to do. In this day and age no child should die from a disease that could be prevented by immunisation. The opportunity to save lives by fully funding the vaccination of children must not be squandered.
Immunising children is arguably the greatest health success story of the last century. Vaccines already save the lives of around two and a half million children every year, and they have the potential to save millions more. Mozambique has one of the world’s highest under-five mortality rates with pneumonia and diarrhoea among the biggest killers – both can be prevented by immunisation.
Keeping vaccinations cold under the blistering Mozambique sun and delivering them to places accessible only by foot or motorbike are just a couple of the many challenges our health workers face everyday. Yet day after day they do it because vaccines are vital, saving millions of lives every year.
The bloggers she is taking include Lindsay Atkin is a hugely popular YouTuber, Chris Mosler is an influential parenting blogger and Tracey Cheetham is a political blogger and recently elected councillor and Liz has asked the blogging community to support and pass on the information to as many people as possible. To help them #PassItOn.
There are several ways you can do this:
Follow them on Twitter @savechildrenuk @savechildrenuk using #Passiton and help us RT
Follow @MrVaccine on Twitter (live from May 26th)
Follow all our bloggers using the links below
Sign our petition and PassItOn to your friends http://bit.ly/lQIjV5
Write your own blog post and then tag your friends to pass it on.
The live action in Africa will be kicking off on: May 30th through to June 5th.
The Facebook ap and webpage go live on May 23rd. If you do feel you can blog about this please use #Passiton to tweet it out and let Liz know by emailing her at l.scarff@savethechildren.org.uk
GOOD LUCK TO ALL OF YOU and I’m looking forward to reading all about it.
Eclipse
May 19, 2011That’s great, but maybe they should do some education work in Europe too, if this article is anything to go by http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13378119. It makes me so cross when people don’t vaccinate when they have access and the opportunity to do so.